


Origin Story

by VanaTuivana



Series: Tales from the Learning Curve [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: First Dates, Humor, Kissing, Light Angst, M/M, Magic, Original Universe, POV First Person, Superpowers, Trust Issues, hero/villain relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 15:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12192726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanaTuivana/pseuds/VanaTuivana
Summary: First comes sex magic, then comes dating... As a Defender of Democracy and a bona fide superhero, Damien definitely knows better than to get more involved with a supervillain than he already is, but he just can't resist Alex's charms (or his arms).   One date probably isn't the end of the world.  Right?





	Origin Story

I knew going in that dating Alex (who was not only a really hot guy with ridiculously gorgeous eyes and the thighs of a Greek god, but _also_ a mad-scientist supervillain who had probably spent the week secretly plotting and/or carrying out villainous misdeeds in between texting me about our dinner plans) was going to be a really, really bad idea. Probably a worse idea than that time I ran off to face down the Temptress all on my own, and that fiasco ended with me almost kicking the bucket. This was going to end similarly poorly, I was almost certain.

But I’ve never actually been very good at saying no to things I want, even if I know they’re bad for me. Witness my inability to _not_ eat an entire Easter basket’s worth of jelly beans all in one go. So there I was on Friday night, sitting in Nona’s Italian Diner, Deli  & Pool Hall, staring across a booth into those incredible golden eyes while firmly ignoring the visions of apocalyptic chaos dancing in my head.

In faded jeans and a green pullover, leaning casually against the scuffed vinyl of his seat, Alex didn’t look dangerous at all. Except for his smile -- _that_ looked just as wicked as his supervillain alter ego, Commander Chaos. “So,” he was saying just now, while blinding me with that stupidly hot smirk, “how did you get into superheroing, anyway?” I pulled what must have been a panicked face and looked around quickly to make sure no one had heard, and he laughed at me. “Don’t worry, kid, nobody’s listening in. Sonic disruptor, right here.” He patted his watch, which _did_ look suspiciously gadget-y now that I was looking closely. “Anybody who can hear us right now is getting the vague sense that we’re talking about sports.”

“Oh,” I said, vastly relieved. It was bad enough that a _supervillain_ knew my secret identity; I didn’t need it spreading any farther. “Good. Um. So, I was thirteen...” I started.

I didn’t tell him the _whole_ story, especially not the bit about the spirit of Merlin showing up in the wishing well at the end of time and space and pronouncing the whole prophecy about how the day I fulfilled my destiny was the day I would also meet my doom. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a first date. But it was actually kind of nice to have somebody closer to my age than, well, the ghost of Merlin to talk to about this stuff. 

So I told him a lot of it: how I spent months convinced that the weird stuff that happened around me was all a prank my older brother was somehow playing on me; how I realized I was doing magic when I saved my high school field trip bus from rolling off a cliff; how Morgana found me before I really knew what I was doing and almost tricked me into giving her my power, and how Princess Powerpunch rescued me from her villainous clutches and sent me off to Castle Magicka to train. And how, when I came back (after spending the equivalent of _years_ learning the mystic arts, the entirety of which took place between two of my heartbeats back on Earth), P.P. introduced me to Captain Courageous and the Defenders of Democracy, and well, everyone knows the rest.

He was a really good listener, honestly. I didn’t get through the whole story until we had both just about finished our dinners, and Alex focused those amazing eyes on me the whole time and asked the right questions in exactly the right spots. He nodded along until I finished, and then he leaned back and blew out a thoughtful breath. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a lot. So… you’re eighteen.”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“But you spent an indeterminate amount of time studying magic in a mystical school outside of reality before coming back to the moment you left.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, distracted by the way he was chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. It was pretty adorable.

He leaned forward to steal the leftover half of my breadstick. “Does that mean you’re really, like, maybe in your early twenties?”

I shook my head. “I’m still eighteen. Legally and physically. Just with more life experience than other eighteen-year-olds.” I kind of knew why he was asking, anyway -- I knew my age had bothered him when we’d had to do that sex magic ritual last week to rid him of Morgana’s evil curse. It also probably doesn’t help that I’m not very tall and I haven’t quite graduated high school. But hey, he’d still asked me out afterwards, so it couldn’t have been _that_ big a deal. Right? I stirred the remains of Coke and ice in my glass. “How old are _you_?”

Alex gave me a little smile. God, he was gorgeous. “Twenty-five.”

That was about what I’d thought, but having him say it made it more real. If my dad knew I was out on a date right now with a guy that much older than me, perfect teeth and amazing eyes would not stop him from raining down death and destruction upon both of us. My dad is definitely overprotective in his way, but it’s not like he doesn’t have good reason for it after what happened to my brother, and -- yeah, that was a pang of guilt right there. I frowned down at my mostly-empty plate.

He reached across the booth to take my hand in his, flipping it palm-up so he could rub at the meat of my palm with his thumb. It felt really nice; I relaxed without thinking about it. “Hey,” he said softly, and I looked up to see him watching me closely. “You’re an adult. I’m an adult. Let’s not get too hung up on numbers, all right?”

“Does that mean you’re going to stop calling me ‘kid’?” I asked, with what I hoped was an arch look. (I’ve only ever read that phrase; I don’t actually know what it’s supposed to look like, but I gave it a shot anyway.)

Alex grinned at me, open and brilliant. “When you stop going by _Kid_ Merlin, sure. Honestly, how old do you have to be before you can upgrade to Merlin Man?”

Okay, I had to laugh at that, and I got so caught up in debating the merits of various future codename options with him (I really do like simply Mage, even if he thinks I need something with more pizzazz and alliteration) that I didn’t notice until the waitress came back and asked us about dessert that I was holding his hand right there on top of the table. 

My face was definitely hot, but Alex didn’t seem fazed by how the waitress was looking at us in an ‘awww, aren’t they cute’ kind of way. And he didn’t let go my hand. “None for me, thanks,” he said, and looked at me. “Damien?”

“Uh,” I said, “same.”

The waitress looked cheerily confused. “Sorry,” she said brightly, “I don’t follow baseball. Now, how do you boys feel about dessert?”

Alex blinked, and then subtly slid his fingers over his watch, presumably to disable the sonic disruptor. “No thanks,” he said. “I think we’ll just take the check.”

He paid and left a generous tip and I didn’t protest, because, well, I _am_ a high school senior with no source of income, and mad sciencing apparently brings in the big bucks. This was actually what brought me back to earth: I was dating a _villain_. Honestly, I had almost forgotten that he was a bad guy, because he hadn’t actually done a single thing tonight that wasn’t thoughtful, and generous, and sweet.

The Tremendous Trio Memorial Park was just a few blocks from the diner, and when Alex suggested we walk that way, I didn’t have any objections. It was a nice evening, and despite the misgivings that were resurfacing, I didn’t really want to end this. Not yet. Anyway, I still had some questions to ask him.

And he held my hand as we walked, and I didn’t exactly want to let go.

“Alex,” I said, as we reached the fountain in the middle of the park. There were plenty of people around: parents with little kids, teenagers skateboarding, couples walking hand in hand as the sun started to go down. Like us.

“Damien,” he said, smiling down at me. There were honest-to-god butterflies at the way his golden eyes caught the slanting sunlight. I had to clear my throat and look away before I could take my hand away from his.

“Sit down,” I told him, and he obediently perched on the base of the huge statue of Mr. Tremendous. Sure, it was a little bit weathered and discolored, and there was some bird poop and stubborn graffiti on it, but it was still a really majestic statue, and having Mr. Tremendous, my childhood hero, looking down on me made it even more important that I say what I had to say. “Put the sonic thing on again.” He lifted his eyebrows, but swiped his thumb over the face of his watch again, and with that accomplished I faced him with my hands on my hips.

“So this has been fun,” I started. “Dinner and talking to you and all of it. It’s been nice. But. _But_.”

“But I’m Commander Chaos,” he said, still smiling a little, which should have been more irritating than charming but in fact was just the opposite. Ugh.

I huffed a little. “But you’re Commander Chaos! You’re a supervillain, and I’m a member of the Defenders of Democracy! You’re against everything I stand for, and I’m supposed to be taking you to face justice, not taking you to dinner and a walk in the park!”

“Yeah,” he agreed with no trace of worry in his voice. “But that would cut our date short, and you said you were having such a nice time.”

I frowned as deeply as I could. He wasn’t taking this seriously -- he wasn’t taking _me_ seriously -- and that always made me mad no matter who it was coming from. I tried not to do magic in civilian dress just in case anyone noticed anything weird about me (hello, secret identity here), but I don’t always make the best decisions when my hackles are raised. I muttered the incantation and gestured to cast a dome of deflection around the two of us.

The dome glowed pearly white and translucent from the inside, and Alex made an interested noise and reached out to touch it. “ _No_ ,” I said firmly, catching his hand to stop him, and shoved right up into his personal space to make him pay attention. “Listen to me! I _cannot_ date you. You. Are. A. Supervillain.”

Alex didn’t push back at all, just looked at me with a particular glint in his eye I wasn’t sure I liked. “Am I right in assuming the spell you just cast means nobody can see us?” he asked.

I frowned at him. “They can see what they _think_ we’re doing, which is just sitting here and talking, but don’t change the subject. This can’t work between us, and I don’t know what you’re doing pretending it can.”

He slid his free hand down to my waist, drawing me in even closer between his knees where he still sat perched on the statue’s base, and suddenly I realized it probably hadn’t been a great idea to get so close. “It worked between us last week,” he said, his voice gone low and intimate, “when you saved me from dark magic, and kissed me, and passed out in my bed after some amazing sex.” My heartrate was climbing as he leaned in to brush a kiss against my lips. “Don’t you think that means something?”

I couldn’t help but shiver as his hand stole around my waist to haul me in closer, so I was chest to chest with him, practically breathing the same breath. It was just as intoxicating as I remembered, being so close, and this time there wasn’t even any powerful ancient magic trying to seduce me. 

Just an unfairly gorgeous supervillain and his incredible eyes, looking at me like I was something special. 

“Stop,” I said weakly.

Honestly, I wasn’t so sure he would, but to my mix of relief and disappointment, he dropped his hands and leaned back against the statue. I stepped back, and I could breathe again. I pushed my hands through my hair, leaving it in disarray. “Listen, I just… I can’t _trust_ you.”

Alex nodded as if that were totally reasonable. “If I were in your place, I probably wouldn’t trust me much either,” he agreed.

I peered at him, not sure if he was teasing me again. He seemed to really like teasing me. “So you agree we can’t do this?”

“Not at all,” he answered, and smiled up at me. “I think it’ll be difficult, and we’ll both have to work at it. But I also think we should try. And here’s why.” He pushed himself up and stepped forward to take both my hands in his, which I allowed because his hands were just so warm. “You had a week to talk yourself out of this date, with all the very good reasons in the world that it was a bad idea. So did I. And we both still showed up.”

I opened my mouth automatically to argue, but... he was actually right. Which was very annoying. I shut my mouth again, and Alex grinned down at me. “That tells me you’re into me, or at least you’re curious about the possibilities here. And I’m definitely into you.” My cheeks flushed again. Was I happy? Embarrassed? Nervous? I didn’t know how I felt, but there were definitely butterflies crashing around in my stomach. “Anyway, it’s not like you’re the first member of the Defenders to get with somebody on the other side of the line. It _can_ work out.”

“How?” I asked him. “If I can’t trust you, _how_ can it work out?”

Alex squeezed my hands. “The thing is, there’s part of you that does trust me, Damien. Even if you don’t know why. I hate to keep bringing this up, but you let me get you alone in my lab, you told me your _name_. Names have power, you know, and you gave yours up just because I asked.” He took another step closer, those golden eyes locked on mine. “You kissed me. You fucked me so hard you passed out. Sure, it was for the spell, whatever, but you were pretty enthusiastic about it, as I recall.” 

I blushed further and tried to look down, but Alex slid our joined hands under my chin and made me lift my head again. His grin was lopsided this time, and it was ridiculously adorable. “And then you fell asleep in my bed, in my secret lair, when you didn’t even know where you were. You ate my pancakes and didn’t check for poison. You _trust_ me, Damien Yang.”

“I make bad decisions,” I argued, though I’ll admit it was weak. “Ask anybody. I run off and do dumb things, including everything that happened with you last week. I’m supposed to be trying to _not_ do dumb things.”

Alex lifted his thumb to rub gently over my lower lip. I shouldn’t have done it, but I leaned into the touch. What did I just say about me and bad decisions? “There’s nothing dumb about this, little mage,” he promised, and dipped in to kiss me again.

It was a real kiss, not just the brush of lips from before, and the heat rising in my blood because of it made me reckless real fast. I pushed into the kiss until Alex stumbled backwards to catch himself against the statue again, and I took his face in both my hands (he had just a hint of prickly stubble on his jawline; I had never kissed anyone who could grow actual facial hair before and it was _incredibly_ hot) and kissed him back.

The dome of deflection shone pearl-white around us; outside the dome, the world went on. Parents chatted on the benches, little kids played tag around the fountain, teenagers shoved each other. And I kissed Alex until we were both breathless, gasping and pulling at each other. One of my hands got lost in his amazing dark hair, and his were all over my back and wandering downward.

When I broke away to breathe, his lips were red and wet and he looked awed. It was just like (see, bad decisions) the way he’d looked at me in his bed that night, when I’d just finished sex-magicking the curse out of him, right before I passed out. I sucked in a breath and touched his mouth without knowing what to say or do next.

He kissed the tips of my fingers very softly, and then turned away, straightening out his clothes. “Let’s walk, little mage.”

“Uh,” I said, valiantly trying to hide how hard I was from that kiss, _God_. “Give me a minute.”

Once I’d cooled down a bit and dropped the dome around us (we got a weird look from a little kid who happened to be looking at the right moment, but otherwise nobody seemed to notice a thing), we walked on. He didn’t hold my hand this time, and didn’t even really look at me for a good five minutes.

“Do you remember what happened to them?” he said finally. I was confused for a second until I saw that he was looking back toward the fountain. The statue of Mr. Tremendous, flanked by Mysteria and Golden Boy on either side, was lit up by the sunset, and it was all very dramatic.

“Yeah,” I told him, solemnly. Looking at those statues, it’s hard not to feel the weight of what happened to the Tremendous Trio. I was pretty young when it happened, but that just means I grew up with the tragedy looming in my consciousness. I even wrote an essay about them one Heroes’ Day for a newspaper contest and won a hundred dollars, which my dad made me put straight into my college fund. “I mean, I was just a kid,” I added. “But it was kind of a formative event.”

He nodded, just as solemn. “Tell me about it?” he requested. “What you remember. What it was like.”

I blew out a breath. This was pretty heavy stuff for a nice night out, but I sat down on the next bench anyway. Alex slid in next to me, almost touching but not quite. I could just feel his warmth against my side. 

 

“I was eight,” I started. I didn’t have to dig for the details -- everything about that day was burned into my memory, even if I had been little at the time. “It was right after my birthday, a Saturday, and I was at the city zoo with my dad and my brother.” I smiled a little at the memory. It hardly ached at all, now, thinking about Dylan. “We had just gotten to the giraffes. I _loved_ giraffes. My brother was bored, because he was older and he thought he was so much cooler than me. He was begging to go see the lions, and he and my dad weren’t looking up, but I was, and I saw it.” I gestured toward the sky. “ _Boom_. That huge explosion that filled the whole sky and shook the town. Everybody started screaming and running, but I thought it was beautiful. Like the biggest fireworks show ever.” I glanced at Alex sideways to make sure he didn’t think I was nuts for that, but he just looked pensive, staring off at the statues. “Anyway, so, everybody had to go into the snake house to take shelter until we found out what was going on. I cried all night after they said on the news that the Three were dead. Golden Boy was just a teenager, not that much older than my brother was, and Mr. Tree was my favorite superhero, you know? I guess… I kind of wanted to be like him.”

He nodded, still looking deep in thought. “A lot of kids did,” was all he said.

“Did you?” I asked. 

Alex’s face did something really weird at that question, kind of scrunching up, lips twisting. He looked somewhere between horrified and offended and terribly sad, and I didn’t think he was actually going to answer, but eventually he said, “I guess, a little.”

This was my chance to ask him the question that had been bouncing around my brain for a full week, even if I was a little bit scared to know the answer. “So how did you get from that to…” I gestured at him. 

“Supervillainry?” he supplied. He turned to look directly at me, meeting my eyes. “I can’t tell you that. Yet.” I frowned at him, displeased, because I had told him _my_ whole origin story. Well, most of it. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.” He really did look sorry. “One day I will, I promise, Damien. But right now I want to tell you something about what I do as Commander Chaos.”

“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand before he could tell me anything sensitive. “You know that I _am_ a member of the Defenders, and that means that anything you say can and will be used against you--”

He grinned at me, looking what I can only describe as gratified. “You’re trying to protect me from yourself, little mage? That’s sweet.” He leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Thanks. I promise, I won’t tell you anything I’ll have to erase from your memories later on.”

I was pretty sure he was joking about that even being a possibility, but I wasn’t about to get distracted by asking. “Okay,” I said, and lifted an eyebrow at him.

“I’m not in it to hurt people,” he said, keeping his golden eyes fixed on mine. It was intense, and I thought it was important not to look away. I don’t think I could have if I tried, anyway. “That’s not what I do. I don’t kill civilians, and I try to keep injuries to a minimum. I might be a mad scientist by profession, but I’m not actually insane, and I’m not evil. Can you trust me on that?”

I thought about it for a few moments. What did Commander Chaos actually _do_? He’d attacked government and military facilities more times than I could count, causing a lot of damage and running off with materials and tech and sabotaging top-secret projects. He’d kidnapped a handful of scientists and politicians. He’d held the entire nation’s housecats hostage to get those asterium crystals from the government. He caused a lot of property damage and a lot of chaos (ha), but no, people normally didn’t get hurt because of him.

But there was the one glaring exception. I didn’t really want to use it against him when he was looking at me like that, but _he_ had brought the subject up, and I needed to know. 

“Meteor Man,” I said. “And Sunrunner.”

Alex broke eye contact at last, dropping his gaze to the ground. “Yeah. That.” He frowned, fiddling with the button on his shirtsleeve. “What happened to them was not my goal. They weren’t supposed to be there at all, and -- I know it doesn’t mean anything at this point, but I did try to save them.”

Okay, I might have been addled by his ridiculous hotness and how he was acting like a really nice, sweet guy, but _that_ I just could not swallow. “I’ve seen the tapes! You threw them into a dimensional rift!” 

He shook his head immediately. “No. No, I -- it might have looked that way from the outside, but please believe me, it’s not what happened. Damien, I _promise_ , I did not kill them.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut and watched him. Alex stared down at his hands, pressing them together hard. “If I could go back and change what happened,” he said after a long moment of silence, “I would. But I don’t have that power.”

I couldn’t quite believe that what I’d seen on that horrific video (the Defenders had a copy they used in new-hero orientation to really hit home how dangerous this life could be, and Cap especially liked to show it when he thought somebody was taking too many risks in the field) was a lie. But Alex looked so sad with his head bowed and his hair hanging in his face, and it tugged at my heartstrings, so I put my hand on his shoulder in hopes of being comforting, and I pushed the images of the deaths of two heroes out of my head and told them not to come back.

“Okay,” I said after another minute. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think right now. But… you were right before. I do trust you, probably more than I should, so I trust you on this, too.”

He glanced sidelong at me from under his perfectly swoopy hair. “You’re really something else, you know that?” he said.

“The one, the only,” I said, hoping to make him smile.

It worked, at least a little. At least his lips quirked a little upward, which was about what I could have hoped. “The inimitable Kid Merlin.” He sat up, pushing his hair back again, and don’t think I didn’t see him rubbing surreptitiously at his eyes. I pretended not to notice, though. I’m nice that way. “So, it’s getting late. I should probably get you home, right?”

I realized with a start that the sun had almost finished setting and the streetlamps were turning themselves on all around us. The park was emptying out, just a few strolling couples left as the dusk settled in around us, and the air was already getting cooler. I checked my phone. It was past nine, and my dad was home tonight, and I really didn’t feel like coming up with yet another excuse for staying out past curfew, even if it wasn’t a school night.

“Yeah,” I agreed, and we both stood up. It just felt right to take his hand again as we walked out of the park.

We didn’t talk on the way back to my house. I hadn’t told him where I lived, but I wasn’t that surprised that he knew the way anyway. He’d given me a lot to think about tonight, but if I’m being honest, I spent six blocks mostly focused on how warm and strong and sure his hand felt in mine.

Alex stopped us just outside the circle the porch light made in front of my house, tugging me around to face him. “So,” he said softly.

“So?” I said. The butterflies were back in my stomach.

He grinned down at me, stepping in close so I had to tip my head up to keep my eyes on his. “Good night, little mage.” And he kissed me, soft but lingering, not even touching me anywhere but my lips, but I could feel it _everywhere_. I closed my eyes to keep hold of that feeling, and even after he stepped back I could still feel it shivering up and down my spine.

When I opened my eyes again he was gone. 

I had to stand outside a while until my lips stopped tingling.


End file.
